1st Edition

Romancing the Tomes Popular Culture, Law and Feminism

By Margaret Thornton Copyright 2002

    This provocative collection of essays by scholars from the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand explores the uneasy relationship between law and popular culture from a feminist perspective. The essays not only consider the representation of law in popular culture, including film, crime fiction and the media, but also the representation of popular culture in legal texts.

    Romancing the Tomes shows that while popular culture is bewitched by law, particularly anything to do with sex and crime, law is anxious to resist the unruliness of popular culture. The collection is multidisciplinary, with contributors from a range of areas, including cultural studies, women's studies and legal studies. The essays are complemented by the poems of prize-winning lawyer-poet, MTC Cronin. Romancing the Tomes will appeal to a wide cross-section of academic and general readers. It is suitable for inclusion on undergraduate reading lists for law, history, women's studies, criminology and media studies, as well as any other course with an interest in cultural studies.

    PART ONE: INTRODUCTION Poem: The Law of the First Venus 1 Law and Popular Culture: Engendering Legal Vertigo PART TWO: JUDICIAL NOTICE Poem: Canto of Silent Men 2 Lawyers Reading Law/Lore as Popular Culture: Conflicting Paradigms of Representation 3 She’s Watching the Judges: Media Feedback Loops and what Judges Notice PART THREE: TESTAMENT AND TEXTUALITY Poem: Justice 4 Legal Sensations: Sexuality, Textuality and Evidence in a Victorian Murder Trial 5 Domestic Violence, Discourses of Romantic Love, and Complex Personhood in the Law 6 Having Trouble with the Law: Racialised Punishment and Testimonies of Resistance PART FOUR: FEMINIST HISTORIOGRAPHIES Poem: Little Daffodils of Spring 7 Language as the ‘Pretty Woman’ of Law: Properties of Longing and Desire in Legal Interpretation and Popular Culture 8 Madonna and/or Whore?: Feminism(s) and Public Sphere(s) 9 ‘The Barmaid’, ‘The Landlady’ and ‘The Pub[lican]’s Wife’: History, Law and the Popular Culture of Women’s Work in Pubs PART FIVE: HETEROSEXING CYBERCULTURE Poem: Small Judgements 10 The Legal Regulation of Cyberpornography: Law’s Quest for Borders in a Borderless World 11 Jail Babes: Turning the Sex of Women’s Imprisonment Inside Out PART SIX: FICTIONS OF THE REAL Poem: Death Ache 12 The Moral of the Story: Gender and Murder in Canadian True Crime Magazines of the 1940s 13 ‘The Mystery of the Missing Discourse’: Crime Fiction Readerships and Questions of Taste 14 The Illusion of the ‘Real’ in Ian Callinan’s The Lawyer and the Libertine; Epilogue—Poem: The Law of Questions Unanswered

    Biography

    Margaret Thornton is Professor of Law and Legal Studies at La Trobe University, Melbourne. Her current research interests are in the areas of feminist legal theory, discrimination jurisprudence, and legal education.